Making Of GH House

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"Norwegian lake shore "By
Bertrand Benoit
The last of the GH House Challenge making-of articles is ...

Making Of GH House

Making Of GH House "Norwegian lake shore "ByBertrand Benoit

The last of the GH House Challenge making-of articles is here! Done by the Grand Prize Winner, Bertrand will describe the process of creating his ‘Norwegian lake shore’ theme for the GH House. You will find 2 additional mini tutorials in the how-to section and linked from within this article describing the use of the Floor Generator script and the rain drop creation process in more detail. I hope you’ll enjoy this article

The ConceptMy first step when approaching the challenge was to think hard and as precisely as possible about the concept and to look for solid reference material I could always get back to throughout the creation process. The idea, not a very original one as it turned out, was to move the house from its Middle-Eastern context to Scandinavia – more specifically to a windswept Norwegian lake shore. The concept was partly motivated by the desire to try my hand at realistic rock formations, something I had not done before.

my House in Order

Since the house model was provided – and since everyone models differently, using their own conventions – I began by tweaking and re-arranging the model in a way that made it more familiar to work with. This ensured things would remain organized and manageable as the scene became complex.One initial step was to go over the geometry and separate it into objects corresponding roughly with the materials I was going to use. As a proxy for the materials, I first assigned a color to each of these parts to help visualize the outcome and make sure it worked.

The second step was to create selection groups and layers for each of these segments of the house in order to facilitate mass editing of their materials

On GeometryI did some relatively extensive re-modeling too, trying both to adapt the house to its new context (the wood shutters and the swimming pool made no sense for dark and gloomy Scandinavia) and adding detail in the areas that I might use for close-ups. I also wanted to give it a bit of a personal touch to differentiate it from other entries.These added details ranged from handrails to fireplaces. I also double-glazed all the window panes – this may sound like overkill, but this results in beautifully realistic double-reflections when rendering.

I opted to model the hardwood parquet floor (and the deck outside) instead of using textures. For this, I used a great free 3ds Max script called Floor Generator. Coupled with the Multi Texture plugin, it makes creating hyper-realistic floors a breeze. Not only do these show no visible tiling, but they can be seen at very close-range, giving you a lot more options when picking your POV. I use these scripts all the time, not just for parquets but for paving and cladding. This is one of those simple tools that really take your archviz to the next level.Lighting

When working, I tend to spend most of my time on lighting and material creation. For the exterior shot, I wanted to re-create a northern sunset feel, with a strong blue ambient light and a faded pink sunlight.

For this I used a blueish dusk HDR sky for the ambient color and a direct light (instead of a VRaySun) for the sun, so as to better control its color. In the end, however, I strayed quite far from this original concept, which can happen when a project takes a life of its own.

MaterialThe concept called for a mixture of timber and concrete. Although I initially used commercial textures to sketch things out, I almost always tend to switch to my own textures as I go along.

The timber map above was made from photos of old wood collected on CGTextures and assembled into a map with diffuse, bump, specular and glossiness components. The concrete texture below was made from my own photos.

Typically, my scenes contain vast numbers of materials (always VRay materials). All of them are different, but as a rule, I almost always use the diffuse, reflection, glossiness and bump slots since nearly every surface in real life has a degree of reflectivity. This, sometimes very subtle, reflectivity and glossiness can really make a difference in how materials catch the light under certain angles. Most of my materials also include a fresnel falloff. Of course, the drawback of such mats, with detailed, unfiltered textures and glossy reflections, are longer render times.Instead of using standard UV projection methods for the timber, concrete and other materials, I opted to unwrap the meshes in order to get the texture maps to wrap realistically around edges.

In the case of the concrete, I used several sets of UV coordinates. One of them was used to overlay a dirt map over the concrete texture and create dirty rain drippings at the top of walls (remember, wet climate).I always give my window materials, an often neglected aspect of archviz, special care. First, as I mentioned, I tend to model the double glazing in order to create double reflections. I then apply a noise map in the bump slot of the glass material to simulate the slight curvature of window panes, which are never flat. But this is not enough. In order to prevent the curvature of a window from neatly transitioning to the next (as though they were one solid glass object), I randomly assign material IDs to the glass panes. I then link these ID’s to as many versions of the noise map as there are ID’s, each with a different Phase. You can also add a “bulge map” – a bitmap or a radial gradient – on top of the noise map to simulate the deformation undergone by the window panes because of pressure differences between interior and exterior.
The landscapeOne of the most satisfying aspects of this challenge was to create the rock elements. What I discovered was that it’s all in the texture, specifically the displacement texture. I began by creating several nicely tiling, decent-sized rock texture maps by using photos from CGTextures. I made sure to apply the same color correction to them so that they would blend nicely in the image, like geological cousins.Each diffuse map was used to generate a specular and a displacement map. There are several tools that can do that, including CrazyBump and Pixplant and I would be at a pain to say which is the best.

The final rock material was a VrayBlendMaterial mixing a wet-rock (darker, more reflective, high-gloss) and a dry-rock (more diffuse, lighter) material. I used a black-and-white map as a mask to mix the two ensuring that only the bottom parts of the rock looked wet.

Having settled on the displacement settings during tests (see above), I moved to modeling the promontory on which the house would be perched. Although I began with soft, flowing forms, I soon realized the rocks were more believable if the mesh was coarse and angular

For the displacement, I used a VRay 2D displacement modifier (faster and less memory-hungry than 3D displacement). I eventually modeled a big portion of landscape, including a road and approach to the house, which I ended up not showing in the final exterior render.

For the lake surface, I used a 3D displacement modifier as I needed to mix a bitmap and a procedural noise map to create a non-tiling surface (the 2D modifier does not read procedural maps). The water material included a blueish fog color and a relatively strong reflection falloff.The Vegetation

For the trees, I used an XFrog conifer collection from Greenworks as shown below.

Not the most detailed trees but satisfyingly poly-light. I also used an Evermotion tree for close-ups. The smaller vegetation (grass, bushes, weeds…) was modeled by hand and converted to VRay proxies.

For distribution I used both the commercial VrayScatter plugin (to cover vast areas of grass) and the free AdvancedPainter script whenever I needed precise positioning of weed, trees or boulders.

PropsI generally model all my props myself and I had great fun creating accessories for this project. These included furniture, lighting elements, decorative elements, toys, a log fire complete with simulated fire, some larger architectural elements, etc.here are images of some of those props…

No prop, however, was as ambitious as the huge bookshelves, which includes dozens of unique, high-poly book meshes and which I think ended up giving a lot of its character to the final interior image. This was an immense pain to model and texture but I think it was worth it.

POV’s and Renders

The most agonizing moment came when I had to decide which of my darlings I would kill. With two images required, it was clear that my final images would not include all my models, props, materials and lighting ideas.The victims included a lot of the furniture I had made, the fireplace, the second floor rooms, an overcast-day lighting scheme I really liked, and the entire approach to the house, including the road…In the end, I settled on two very different scenarios… A sunset shot for the exterior taken with a 200mm lens and very much focused on the house and a night situation for the interior, done by combining VrayIES lights and a dusk blue HDR map.

I later decided to shoot the interior from the exterior with a wide angle, which allowed me to play with reflections on the glass and create something of a left-to-right gradient from the cold blue of the exterior to the warm yellows and oranges of the interior. On a side note, after struggling to find a decent POV for this, I ended up placing my camera behind a concrete wall and using a clip plane to make the wall disappear. So the shot is not one that would have been possible in real life!At this stage and because of RAM and render-time issues, I split the scene in two. One included the entire landscape and a simplified, low-poly version of the furnishing while the other included a simpler landscape and much more detailed furnishing. All common elements (mainly the house and garden) were dropped into a Max Container to ensure any changes applied to them would propagate to both scenes.Last-minute touches for the exterior included a lot of tweaking of the rock displacement, sea material, lighting and sky. I decided very late to add an after-the-rain element to the interior to further emphasize the cold-outside/warm-inside duality. For the deck, I used hand-painted reflectivity and specular maps to create the wet material.

For the rain drops on the window, I first created the scene in 3D, scattering hundreds of low-poly water-drop meshes onto a plane using the AdvancedPainter script. I then rendered a ZDepth pass of the scene through an orthographic camera – essentially turning this little setup into a bump/displacement map. All that was left was to make the map horizontally tileable and apply it to my basic windows glass material.

For both images, I rendered in passes (beauty pass, ZDepth, reflections, fog, ID…) in order to retain maximum control over the final images at the composting stage. Effects such as depth of field (lens blur), color correction, glows, glares and a little chromatic aberration were all done in post.

رد: Making Of GH House

For more detail about the process of creating the rain drops

Before you start, get yourself a few nice photo references. This is an important step. Everyone has seen rain-splattered windows before and they will instantly notice if the effect is not realistic. I cannot post my reference images here for copyright reasons, but one thing I noticed looking at them is that they all show not just round drops sticking to the glass, but also vertical streaks of more elongated drops, which is what is left behind when the heavier drops drip down the glass. I also noticed all drop kind of “hang” downwards due to gravity.

The first step is to model a few dropsThese are low-poly spheres I’ve squeeze and generally mistreated using 3ds Max free form tools. As you can see, the drops are all “hanging” towards the ground to mimic the effect of gravity. You’ll also notice that I have two sorts of drops – roundish ones and elongated ones for the streaks. It is also important that the pivots of these drops remain at the centre of the spheres.
Next, create a plane approximately the size of your window pane. We will use this as support to “paint” our drop objects. For the painting, I use the SuperRandomizer function of the AdvancedPainter script. You can find my settings here:
I paint in two passes, starting by selecting only the elongated drops and painting the vertical streaks. Make sure you have no random rotation selected as all the drops need to point downwards. However, you can add a little scale variation for more realism.
Then select all the round drops and paint around the streaks. Note that no round drop should cross the streaks as the falling drops would have removed all of the water in their path. Instead of painting at random, I tried to distribute the drops in a logical way. My references showed they were all pretty much equidistant from each other. Also, you do not want two drops overlapping. I also added a third pass, with the round drops at a smaller scale to paint at the periphery of the map. This can all take quite a long time but it will ensure maximum realism.
The image above shows the finished scene with all drops painted. Of course, you can vary the density for a more-or-less wet effect. Here, I wanted my drops to collect at the bottom of the windows, as though the rain had sprayed on the windows when smashing on the deck.
Now we need to render our map by calculating a ZDepth pass of the scene using an orthographic camera. This will create an image with only depth information in it, which can be plugged straight into the bump slot of any material.
The image above shows how to set up the camera and the ZDepth render element. The range is used only to tell us what kind of depth information we need. In this example, we are not interested in anything outside the range of the camera, so we can input these values into the ZDepth element parameters.
The image above shows a close-up of the ZDepth pass.
All you need to do at this stage is to make the map tileable in your 2D application. In this example, I only needed the map to be horizontally tileable. I also added a lot of blank space above to accommodate for the upper part of the window, which is not wet. Black means no bump while white means maximum bump. Now you can apply this map to any window pane object and its material. Bear in mind that the bump map should only be projected onto one side of the glass (there shouldn’t be drops inside the home). You can do this by selecting all the “dry” parts of the windows in your UV editor and make sure they are all mapped to the black part of the bump map (black = no bump).
The image above shows how the glass material looks like when the bump map is applied. As you can see, the drops act very much like real drops, distorting the image behind them, even though the glass plane is just a thin box with no additional geometry. The map also plays well with in-camera DOF (I used the Vray Physical Camera), and generate nice bokehs where they are supposed to. Note that you cannot do post-production DOF on this kind of image.
You can find my glass material settings below:
As you can see, it is very simple.